Imprisonment with the help of artificial memories — scientist proposes a virtual replacement for prisons

Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator from Yemen, knows how to relieve overcrowded prisons. He suggested creating a virtual prison in an interview with Wired.

A specialist is proposing a new neurological prison system that he calls Cognify. He published a video presentation of the virtual justice facility, and it may seem terrifying. Instead of locking prisoners up for long periods of time, inmates will be subjected to artificial memories in a virtual environment. The system creates specialized content generated by artificial intelligence that is converted to visual information and delivered to the prisoner’s brain, as well as to parts of their DNA and RNA associated with memory formation, to create a template for long-term memory.

Currently, no such technology exists, and Cognify is only a proposal. However, Al-Ghaili argues that experiments conducted on animals prove that this process could work on humans sometime in the future. The study, published in March in the scientific journal Nature, used mice as test subjects and found that memories are likely formed by broken and reassembled DNA strands.

Of course, there are ethical implications that would need to be considered if such a system were to become a reality. Al-Ghaili says that Cognify could be here in ten years, but only «if we can overcome the ethical constraints that prevent testing such technology».

Cinematography has repeatedly addressed similar inventions. In particular, the Italian film «False Memory» («Ipersonnia») tells the story of a hyperdream that disrupts memories. The 2016 Australian film «Other Life» («OtherLife») tested a technology that allowed a prisoner to relive years of captivity in a few minutes of real time. In one of the episodes of the 1995 American-Canadian series «The Outer Limits», the hero is made to believe that he has committed a murder and spent his entire life in prison. He wakes up only to condemn the system of punishment that he had defended only moments before.

Earlier, Hashem Al-Ghaili created a presentation of body transplantation technology, which he does not currently have. The previous project is already looking for investors and specialists, but it is also only a video presentation at the moment.